Devel::Cover Grant Report for July

In accordance with the terms of my grant from TPF this is the monthly report for my work on improving Devel::Cover covering July 2012.

This month I released Devel::Cover 0.90, 0.91 and 0.92.

I wasn't able to spend as much time working on Devel::Cover this month as I had hoped to. The time I did spend was primarily on working through RT and github tickets, resolving those I could and merging pull requests.

RT 62423 concerns Devel::Cover failing its tests when it is built in a directory containing spaces, which appears to be the default when building with cpan on OSX. I couldn't build on OSX, but I did fix things up so that Devel::Cover should now work in directories which
contain spaces. (But if you prefer your life to be easier, I suggest you don't do that.)

I made a change I've been considering for quite some time, which is to get the @INC directories from perl itself.

At build time we put the @INC directories in @Devel::Cover::Inc::Inc so that we will be able to ignore them by default at runtime. That works well normally, but sometimes the build environment differs from the run environment which can result in default coverage of core modules.

The solution is to shell out to perl and ask it what its @INC is. Of course it's not quite that easy.

And shelling out isn't very nice, but when the new V module for introspection is in place we can use that instead.

I also fixed up a n earlier change I had made which made all the tests fail on Windows. Devel::Cover itself still worked, but almost all of the tests didn't. Christian Walde's cpantesters smoker detected the problem quickly and we diagnosed the problem together on IRC. So I eventually got around to installing Perl on Windows (which turned out to be pretty simple) and then it was just a matter of getting the quoting such that both *nix and Windows were happy, and hoping that other platforms work too.

(On which note, does anyone use Devel::Cover on anything other than *nix and Windows?)